| 44 | MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY Office of Research and Sponsored Programs
Kyriakoudes and Kristine M. McCusker, an MTSU History professor, wrote the proposal to acquire the headquarters with an emphasis on collaborating with many on-campus partners, such as the Gore Center, Department of History, Public History master’s and doctoral programs, Center for Historic Preservation, Center for Popular Music, and College of Liberal Arts. The Gore Center is named for the late Albert Gore Sr., a 1932 MTSU graduate who served as both a U.S. representative and senator from Tennessee and is also the father of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Scholars come from all over the world to the Gore Center to study documents he created that passed through his office. The partnership paid off in a big way as Kyriakoudes was part of three MTSU grant-writing teams that netted $1.375 million in total new funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2021. The NEH grants, two involving the OHA, accounted for 56% of awards to Tennessee entities. Additionally, the Gore Center made important research acquisitions recently in political memorabilia and LGBTQ+ archival materials.
THE ART OF THE INTERVIEW Chicago-based author Studs Terkel popularized the discipline in the 20th century when he published oral histories focusing on themes that included working, war, race, jazz, the Great Depression, movies, and religion.
“Oral historians really do practice history from the bottom up,” Kyriakoudes said. “We want to preserve the stories of a variety of individuals to capture the full spectrum of the human experience.” As an example, Kyriakoudes cited an interview he conducted with a former resident of the Old Jefferson community near Smyrna, which was eliminated so that the Tennessee Valley Authority could build a dam on Percy Priest Lake. That talk is in one of several collections of oral histories archived at the Gore Center. The renowned “Middle Tennessee Oral History Project,” which began in 1999 and continues to this day, involves more than 500 recordings of people telling their stories of past events in their own words, including anecdotes of MTSU, African American community leadership in Murfreesboro, veterans, state and local politics, women’s organizations, farming and farm organizations, planning and economic development, and medical history. Kyriakoudes’ deep expertise in oral history no doubt was a key factor in the OHA’s decision to headquarter at MTSU. A decade ago, his team of historians tried to find every surviving World War II veteran in Mississippi and interview them. “The veterans are the ones who were there on the ground, and they can help us understand war in a much more personal way,” Kyriakoudes said. Asked about his most memorable oral history experience, Kyriakoudes recalls interviewing a
